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With Pat Shurmur having been hired as the Giants’ next head coach, Spagnuolo, who openly stated he wanted the full-time job, can now relate to McAdoo a bit.

After two stints and one Super Bowl title with the Giants, the time has come for Spagnuolo to head on down the old dusty trail. And while he admits to being “disappointed,” he puts his future in God’s hands.

“In my mind, [New York] would be the last place I would coach,” Spagnuolo told Newsday of his thinking when he returned to the Giants in 2015. “Sometimes we make plans and God has something else in mind. But it happened the way it happened and now it’s time to move onto something else.

“It may not be this year, and that’s OK. Sometimes when that happens it gives you a chance to sit back and see the big picture. I think that’s always good. When you’re in the middle of it all the time and you put the blinders on and you go, you miss some things. I don’t know what it will feel like because I’ve never not been [coaching] in the middle of a season, but if that’s the way it happens that’s the way it is. I’ll spend some more time with [my wife] Maria, that’ll be a blessing, and then we’ll see what happens next year.”

Although it’s not necessarily too late in the game for Spagnuolo to find employment in the NFL, multiple reports have suggested he’s resigned himself to taking a year off from football.

Part of that may be his disappointment in the Giants passing him over for the head coaching job for the second time in two years.

“As hard as that was at the end of the year I feel blessed that I had an opportunity,” Spagnuolo said. “I think all of us should feel that way, because I think you become closer, you become more educated, you become smarter if you use it when you go through something like that.

“I sit home with Maria sometimes and I say: Three hundred and sixty five days ago if somebody had said to me that this would happen I’d say ‘No way. I’d bet my whole salary on it.’ But that’s this league. Sometimes when things go wrong and it snowballs a little bit this is what happens.”

As sad, disappointed and baffled as Spagnuolo may be by the team’s decision to leave him behind, he admits blue will forever flow through his veins.

“There is still going to be blue running through my veins,” he said. “In a good way. You know how I feel about the people there, the leadership. It worked out the way it was supposed to work out.”

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For all that he’s done and for all that he is as a person, Spagnuolo deserves to be remembered fondly as a key part of Giants history. Not just because he helped the Giants upset the then-undefeated New England Patriots in Super bowl XLII, but because of the way he handled himself in the aftermath of McAdoo’s firing and in the aftermath of his potentially final departure.

Once a Giant, always a Giant.

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